Monday, December 26, 2011

The Israeli government appears to be renewing its efforts to register losses suffered by Jews whose property and assets were seized or abandoned in Arab countries. Dr Avi Bitzur, director-general of the Pensioners' Affairs Ministry, told Pirlee Shahar yesterday on Israeli radio that he wanted to do a complete inventory of losses. He re-stated much of what he said in this Jerusalem Post article from 2009. Let's hope that this time, the campaign really takes off (with thanks: Sylvia):

The Pensioners' Affairs Ministry has created a new department over the past two weeks that will begin to collect specific claims by Jews who lost their property when they left Arab countries during the 20th century. More than 850,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Arab lands and Iran, most after Israel's founding in 1948. Estimates of the value of the property they were forced to leave behind are hard to come by, ranging from as low as $16 billion in known assets to as high as $300b. when estimates of the value of their abandoned real estate are included. "Israel has talked about this on and off for 60 years. Now we're going to deal with it as we should have all along," said Dr. Avi Bitzur, director-general of the Pensioners Affairs Ministry.

The ministry established a department with an initial staff of five to begin to collect the claims of the Jewish refugees, about 80 percent of whom settled in Israel. Bitzur will host a panel on the issue at next week's Herzliya Conference, and over the next two weeks hopes to pass a decision through the cabinet mandating discussion of Jewish refugees whenever the question of Arab refugees are raised in peace negotiations.

According to Bitzur, who is also a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University, the new effort comes to fill a gap in awareness both in Israel and abroad. "The UN has dealt at least 700 times with Arab refugees and their property, but not once with the issue of Jewish property," he says. It's also time for Israelis to get to know better the history of the Jews of Arab lands, who make up some 60% of the ethnic ancestry of Israeli Jews.

"It's time to deal with this amongst ourselves," says Bitzur. "I say that as a citizen, as a father and as an academic. We should know the history of the pogrom in Baghdad in 1941, of the Libyan Jews who ended up in Bergen Belsen. It's time for people to know that there was this part of the Jewish people and its history was brought to an end."

In late 2007, Baghdad-born American Jew Heskel M. Haddad, representing the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries, called on the Israeli government to begin to seriously examine the issue of Jewish property left behind in Arab lands. At the time, Haddad told The Jerusalem Post that WOJAC had a staggering 100,000 square kilometers in property deeds.To hear the Israel Radio interview (Hebrew) with Dr Bitzur scroll down to 'Yuman Ezrahi' on 25.12.11 at 00.12.21

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

First and foremost, thanks for including the picture of my wonderful Souery family: dispersed thanks to Nasser, the majority went to israel. They are all gone now but by extraordinary luck I went to see them when we left that country (Egypt).As for those who fight for our rights, I congratulate them. I want nothing to do with these people (Egyptians) not until they express regrets.Is it so hard to do?As I said before who will give us back our health and mental security? It has no price. "NOT ALL THE PERFUMES OF ARABIA"...can wash away the pain, even today, at this very moment.All we have left are the pictures and these we could get out because of the bachsheesh to the customs officers.suzy vidal

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)